Search Engine Marketing Services: Trends and Predictions

The search engine marketing industry is always evolving at a pace that makes it difficult to believe that search engine marketing solutions can stay on top of the most recent developments. The one constant for search engine marketing companies, and also for the industry generally, is a change for the better, sometimes for the worse, but nearly always important. The business is not right for the faint-hearted or those who abhor change. However, savvy search engine marketing firms attempt to appear ahead to anticipate trends. Here are my predictions of issues that search engine marketing solutions will confront in the short term.

More Accountability Demanded from Search Engine Marketing Firms

Search engine marketing firms that use tactics designed to trick the engines into showing results that aren’t directly addressing the search query will struggle, as more companies start to check at the bigger goals that direct them to investigate search engine marketing solutions in the first location. The”traffic-centric” mindset will grow as firms begin to require accountability from search engine marketing companies concerning bottom line increases. Ranking increases delivered by search engine marketing services will likely be questioned if they do not result in significant traffic increases will be questioned if there’s absolutely no increase in business generated in the website. This is a good thing for quality search engine marketing companies since the”snake-oil” practitioners that have contributed the business such a lousy name will never be given serious consideration by any firm that does its homework at the vendor selection process.

Growing PPC Costs and Increasing PPC Frustration

As bigger companies with huge budgets continue to leap into the pay per click (PPC) stadium, costs will continue to grow. (Typical PPC prices have risen by 37 percent from Q1 2005 to Q1 2006. (1)) This well-funded business will use PPC as a branding instrument as far as a revenue tool, which will squeeze out many of the current smaller advertisers. In fact, the top 10 PPC advertising businesses, based on the amount of PPC impressions, include such names as eBay, NextTag, Vonage, Time Warner, Orbitz, Target, and Yahoo. (2) More large companies continue to join the fray, a lot of them throwing ROI from the window and bidding high costs for desirable keyphrases for the sake of branding. This means that search engine marketing companies will discover little – to midsize companies turning to SEO when they could afford PPC to attain results. Click here to get a free quote

Increased Interest in Organic SEO

Whilst PPC prices rise, there’s also a tendency that no doubt interrupts the engines that offer PPC programs. Sixty-six percent of customers”distrust” paid search advertisements. (3) Up to 85 percent of searchers say that they”often ignore the paid listings”(4), while 87% of clicks take place” on the natural (not sponsored) search results.” (5) Three times as many marketers who outsource the management of their natural SEO to search engine marketing companies and who also take part in pay per click advertising recognize a greater ROI in their search engine marketing services than from PPC. (6) These facts, coupled with the fact that Google has just announced that it will start to take the significance of pages into account when deciding on what sequence the advertisements will appear (which will mean that effective PPC campaigns will require at least some standard organic SEO), point to one obvious outcome –an increase in the amount of businesses which investigate organic SEO programs, whether internally generated or supplied by external search engine marketing firms. Vovia

Continued Reluctance out of Agencies to Pursue Search Marketing

To many, it seems like a perfect fit–traditional marketing agencies joining forces with (or purchasing outright) PPC suppliers and natural search engine marketing services. However, the average agency is frightened to death of search engine marketing solutions in any kind (although some forward-looking agencies have jumped on the search engine marketing bandwagon). The reasons are simple: liability and metrics.

Marketing agencies have for years made cash based upon a percentage of what a company spends on advertising. This version was the accepted standard for decades. But it raises several issues that are ethical. What is the motivation for an agency to recommend spending on non-performing initiatives? Moreover, what causes an agency has to report on the efficacy of all its campaigns? (If an agency’s customers dug deeply into any such metrics, they’d likely reduce their advertising spend dependent on the performance of individual campaigns.) Many PPC service providers have adopted this model, even though the goal of a PPC campaign must be to monitor the metrics of an effort to decrease the spend (eliminating underperforming keyphrases, for instance ).

Good search engine marketing providers provide metrics that scare traditional advertising services. If these agencies have been to present such metrics to their clients, those same customers might start to demand similar metrics for different campaigns (television, radio, magazine ads, etc.). Until the”percent of spend” model is altered, big agencies will continue to reject search engine marketing solutions and will not recommend them to their clients.

Continued Focus on Google for Organic SEO

In general, where Google goes, other motors will follow. Smart search engine marketing solutions will continue to optimize. (7) But, instead of trying to deceive Google by unraveling the latest, ever-changing algorithm, search engine marketing companies will instead use the”piggyback” strategy. This strategy entails learning from the studies that Google conducts of its customers (learning by observing the commonalities of the types of websites that consistently rank highly) and implementing those same attributes to client websites. Search engine marketing companies do not make websites better for Google but for users. As engines attempt to close the relevancy gap in search engine results, search engine marketing companies will be rewarded because the strategies they’ve employed for achievement become the accepted industry standard.

Conclusion

The usage of search engine marketing services is still a new, “unproven” channel to a lot of companies. It is changing the way that standard advertising agencies have to do business. With PPC costs on the rise and the effectiveness of this PPC channel coming into question, more firms will investigate the hiring of search engine marketing companies utilizing approaches for their Internet marketing needs. Smart businesses that outsource organic or PPC advertising will no longer say”what have you done for me lately”–they’ll say”prove what you’ve done for me lately.” Search engine marketing services which are on top of the curve will be happy to do so. https://www.vovia.com/services/convert/local-advertising/